Sherry Chandler

Go read the text of Molly Bingham’s speech at Western last month:

We spent 10 months in Iraq, working on a story, understanding who the people are who are fighting, why they fight, what their fundamental beliefs are, when they started, what kinds of backgrounds they come from, what education, jobs they have. Were they former military, are they Iraqi or foreign? Are they part of al-Qaida? What we came up with is a story in itself, and one that Vanity Fair ran in July 2004 with my text and pictures. [My colleague Steve Connors] shot a documentary film that is still waiting to find a home. But the basic point for this discussion is that we both thought it was really journalistically important to understand who it was who was resisting the presence of the foreign troops. If you didn’t understand that, how could you report what was clearly becoming an “ongoing conflict?” And if you were reading the news in America, or Europe, how could you understand the full context of what was unfolding if what motivates the “other side” of the conflict is not understood, or even discussed?

Just the process of working on that story has revealed many things to me about my own country. I’d like to share some of them with you:

Gary Mex Glazner, editor of Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry, curator of the Word Art series at the Governor’s Museum in Santa Fe, and director of Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, which reads poems to the patients, has written How to Make a Living as a Poet (Soft Skull, 2005). I picked this up from the online excerpt of the Introduction:

So you want to be immortal? Only through great writing can you hope to join the cannon [sic], have your words live on, and be added to the long history of poetry. The goal of this book is to help give you more time to work on your art and to integrate poetry more fully into your life.

It is a step-by-step break down of various strategies using the skills learned as a poet to make your living as a poet and a series of life lessons from working poets on how to integrate the world of commerce with the art form of poetry. Besides the traditional paths of teaching and working with publishers, this book will expose more innovative guerrilla techniques like business sponsorships, unusual poet-in-residencies, and using new media to build the poetry audience.

Glazer also has a blog, Make a Living as a Poet, that you might want to check out.

Meanwhile, the Stick Poet Superhero takes us on a small tour of the Library Hotel with rates starting at about $415/night. The Poets Garden there offers:

spectacular views of the Public Library and surrounding New York architecture. The wicker furniture lends comfort to the guest who wants to unwind in the sunshine with the masters of poetry.

Are those masters living or dead, I wonder. The dead guys probably work cheaper.